Visions of Munich

by Steven Rybicki

The reports about the demise of Munich’s chances for Oscar glory were not exaggerated. Critics opted for Ang Lee’s wounded love story, because of the strength of Brokeback’s stellar cast and they appreciated Lee’s visual compositions (but let’s be honest: the film looks like a motif hybrid between those Marlboro magazine ads in Rolling Stone and the Chevy “Like A Rock” pick-up commercials of the nineties). And, of course, Crash took home the Best Picture prize.

Unfortunately, Munich has been branded by a defective indictment: that the film adopts a position of moral equivalency between the Israeli and Palestinian characters (or metaphorically, the equivalency between the West and “terrorists”). This is odd because, for better or worse, the film, as written by Tony Kushner, upholds a view that presupposes the moral superiority of the West.

It’s regrettable to see this criticism, vigorously argued by writers like Charles Krauthammer, persist. Spielberg and Kushner have taken a more reactive approach to the “interpretive hijacking” of the film’s political content and moral point of view this past week. Yet, there’s one point that Kushner and Spielberg have been coy in admitting: they’re position isn’t just (as Spielberg claims) politically thoughtful or (as Kushner claims) sensitive to the existential consequence of humans butchering humans (regardless of the social structures that “legitimize” such actions), but that their film demonstrates the higher moral development and caliber of the protagonist Israeli characters over any/all of the Palestinians.

The film is “about” two major (psychic, emotional, social, political, etc.) themes: the pursuit of home and the repercussions for killing human beings. Munich does have a perspective that is both staunch in its moral grounding (this is not really in dispute), but to many commentators they do not question or understand where Kushner locates or maintains this ground. In Tony Kushner’s moral narrative there is one moral characteristic that is the sunum bonum when distinguishing the “righteous” from the “lost” (or, in Angels in America the “righteous” from the “Republicans”): self-conscious doubt.

In Munich, like Angels in America, the admirable characters are the ones who, as Kushner implored the Columbia graduates last year at commencement, “interrogate mercilessly the truth you’ve found.” In Angels in America one of the greatest crimes of the antagonist, Roy Cohn (think: a hybrid of Michel Foucault and Al Swearingen who works as the Reagan Administration’s envoy to the John Birch Society) is his failure to have faith in his ideology to the extent that he would have the courage to torture it with self-conscious doubt. Contrasted with Cohn are characters like Prior Walter. He questions his non-belief in the spiritual after his angelic encounters, and then, in “heaven”, questions his questioning by telling Being to let him be. Belize is another astonishing character who questions his place in the margins of American society, at the same time cannot deny that he actively participates in that society, and yet snipes at a character’s leftist and (small-“l”) liberal optimism in the US: “I hate this country. Nothing but a bunch of big ideas and stories and people dying, and then people like you. “

For Kushner, self-aware skepticism and/or doubt in an ideological cause are the indicators that one has correctly accessed the relationship between the individual and dogmas of religion, politics, history, sexuality, etc. And in Munich, self-conscious doubt is integral to how Kushner creates many of the Israeli characters. Sure, it takes more time for Avner, Carl, Robert, and Hans, to acquire the vocabulary and emotional circumspection to understand their doubt than in Angels in America, but few characters have ever been written to rival the intellectual prowess of Prior, Belize, Roy, and Louis. But the main characters in Munich do develop skepticism, still do their jobs, and accept responsibility for all the consequences, good and bad, of their actions.

Yet keep in mind, no Arab characters are endowed with doubt in their cause. Some are very intelligent, argue nuanced positions, or are disarmingly outgoing. The Palestinians can be academically accomplished, understanding the relationship between “narrative and survival”; or they can tell their wife to calm down with her emotional and irrational rantings against the crimes of the occupation, in favor of a more reasoned and calm dissection of the problem; or they can be really charming when talking to strangers on hotel balconies; or they can be stubborn revolutionary demagogues rubbing shoulders with sundry KGB, CIA, IRA, ETA operatives. Yet, all this has the effect of doing is casting the Arab characters as sophisticated zealots. And because of their ideological zealotry they are disqualified from being considered near the top of the dialectical food chain, according to Kushner’s moral rubric.

Krauthammer believes that Islamic terrorists (Palestinians included, one would gather) have qualified as an “existential” threat to the West, on par with the Soviets and the Nazis. Therefore, we must take special exception to any complex presentation of an historical event that might not be easily digestible to the masses. God forbid, “those people” have to see an Arab character who translates books and is nice to his local grocer get shot by “heartless” Jews: that’s just too much of a dramatic burden for audiences to process. Furthermore, Krauthammer finds it necessary to interpret the complexity of the film in ways that bolsters it as anti-Zionist, then maybe anti-Semitic, and then unreflectively advancing the Palestinian cause (oh, my!). This is precisely the problem: attacking the complexity of the film is a deficient project when it is evident that the film is not complex enough, because of its default sympathy for “enlightened” Westerners.

Krauthammer cringes that the film expresses an opinion of the moral bankruptcy of the Israeli cause because of the cross-section of characters in Munich. He’s missing the deeper questions Kushner is raising in an effort make sure that he as the Western screenwriter is still practicing self-conscious doubt. For themes relevant to Kushner’s work, characters like Avner’s mom or Avner’s handler, Ephraim, or The Organization’s Papa, demonstrate Kushner’s questioning of the Palestinian and Israeli priority on a literal, ground-beneath-one’s-feet home, instead of the home humans abstractly create with one another (think of how Avner locates home when in the hospital with his wife: he kisses her and says he is home when he is with her). Now many intelligent people disagree with this notion, but for reasons that are more fundamental to human interaction than how they reconcile the crisis in the Middle East.

Attacks on the film have been made on many fronts. There’s the problem of Spielberg and Kushner having the audacity to take artistic license with historical events. The response to these criticisms is to encourage healthy tit-for-tat arguments about interpretations of art, which happen in all sorts of private conversations after watching a film (Like a few years ago: is it better to think of Black Hawk Down as a realistic war pic, or as a meditation on man, technology, and post-industrial warfare, or dismiss it as mediocre?). Concurrently, Munich aspires to be appreciated on the level of solemn political treatise, or more appropriately due to the film’s editing rhythms, a religious ritual. All of that to say that the Good Friday-sobriety of the film makes it something to be avoided by those who dislike recent American pop-art’s throat-clearing and “I’m saying something important, here” sermonizing (damn, there’s been a lot of that recently).

All of this is to contextualize the extent to which I admired and enjoyed Munich. It is the first time Spielberg has executed his signature technical style, but has sacrificed many of his comfortable storytelling devices in order to create a film that engages many social, political, and moral issues with a clinical and academic rigor that is rare in pop art. And to his credit, he allowed the film to be seen through the residue of Tony Kushner’s creative fingerprints. And, no matter the potential foibles or merits of Kushner’s moral hierarchy, he is one of the most rewarding and challenging wordsmiths in the English language. Condemn him for being too wedded to the idea that the West is dialectically advanced, but don’t confuse his writing’s confusion with complacency in contemporary political narratives.